Yes, exactly.

Old hospitals were designed when we didn’t have antibiotics and we needed to be serious and effective in our hygiene. Now it is all about cost and “efficiency”.

So you have central air-conditioning and heating because it is cheaper and more energy efficient. You also get the current epidemic of hotel bedbugs for the same reason. Instead of practically boiling the laundry, we use less water and cooler water, to “save the planet”.

You get things like surfaces picked for cost effectiveness, not ease of cleaning. There is a reason old schools and hospitals all had polished terrazzo floors. It was because you could bleach and/or steam the bejeezuz out of them without damaging them. Try that with rubber tiles or vinyl sheet flooring.

I have been predicting for years that if we are not really careful, we will get not just a few things becoming “antibiotic resistant”, but a number of lethal things that become antibiotic immune, and we will have to get used to dying of things like infected blisters and insect bites again.

One of the fascinating things he talked about was hospital design, and how we were screwing the pooch with it all. They had, you see, just gotten done with replacing the old Madigan Army Hospital with the new version, and that was a highly modern tower-style affair, with all the bells and whistles. The hospital it replaced was one of the old-style single-level jobs with separate buildings for each ward, spread out over acres and acres with a maze of ramps and connecting corridors.

The point he made about the whole thing was that the old style of hospital had been built that way for very good reasons, and that those reasons had to do with contagion and disease transmission. The new style of hospital that came in with the advent of antibiotics were designed with the theory that there were no infectious diseases we could not put a stop to with a dose of antibiotics…

Which was a theory he found really short-sighted and laughable. This was a guy who literally used to play games designing diseases, and then gaming out how to control them. His take on the new hospital was “Looks cool, stupid design…”, and he’d lay out pages and pages of reasons why the old-school ideas still had merit. Not the least of which was isolation and the ability to get fresh air into each ward, along with the possibility of literally burning out contaminated wards without losing the entire hospital. At the time, there was this MRSA incident in the news, and he laid out why the modern hospital design more-or-less made things like that nearly impossible to eradicate, while with the old ones, you could afford to lose a few wards to contamination you couldn’t deal with short of incinerating the building. Try that with a multi-million dollar tower block hospital…

It was interesting to get him talking with our Engineer officers, because they’d cross-fertilize about the whole history of field hospitals and garrison hospitals, along with some really fascinating trivia about it all. The new-style hospitals are going to bite us all in the ass if they ever get contaminated with something like a really virulent Ebola-style virus, because you’re going to have to write the entire structure off and then deal with dismantling it in situ while your workers are encased in biohazard outfits. In the old-school system, with the hospital laid out on the ground over several acres, if you lost a ward to contamination? All you did was wall it off, and call it good until it was feasible to incinerate the structure in place.

The old-timers were not necessarily stupid; it may well be that the stupid ones are the people who counted on “no virulent disease we can’t control” when designing and building new hospitals.

The son of the President of the United States in, I think, the 20′s or 30′s (Grover Cleveland?), died of septicemia from a blister he got playing tennis.

I remember getting my smallpox vaccination as a little kid. They had set up a big marquee tent at the town hall. My mom took me down, we lined up, got our scratch and a card.

Polio vaccination happened very quickly and efficiently at school back in the day. No fuss, no muss, van shows up, kids line up, pink liquid on a sugar cube and records filled out, all in a couple of days, over the whole town, country wide.

Covid vaccine is a little more complicated, requiring complex refrigeration, but even so, we aught to be able to do it universally, like we used to, in weeks, not in months (or up here in Canada, looks like it might be years!). Why a first world country can’t get licensed production set up, and mass distribution done immediately is beyond me.

Basic hospital hygiene, proper use of quarantine and contact tracing, appropriate use of antibiotics all seem to be known about, but not properly practiced anymore.

But we’ll have to use more carbon emitting energy which will destroy the planet! Unlike in the 70s, where we had super expensive carbon emitting energy which was destroying budgets, thus the windows that don’t open.